BULLY FOR THEM

Sandra Barwick on

a new variant of public-school violence

ON THE playing fields of Marlborough an episode of bullying recently took place. It was a serious incident. If it had taken place outside on the streets, and been done by lads from the town, it would certainly be defined as the criminal offence of assault, probably indecent assault. But such schools have their own, distinct, codes of conduct.

It's a way we have in the army It's a way we have in the navy It's a way we have in the public schools That no one can deny.

That proud boast of Kipling's day is evidently not yet extinct. In this latest case a sixth-former was set upon by a gang of boys two years younger who were watching a floodlit, unsupervised soccer game. The victim's upper clothing was torn off, some of it ripped, the sixth-former was bruised, and all to a backdrop of raucous laughter from the many junior boys watching.

On these facts alone it was a most unusual incident. How did junior boys even contemplate doing such a thing to a sixth-former? Bullying generally happens to those judged inferior. Why was the upper clothing torn off? Afterwards, a master asked a most unusual question: could the assault be regarded as in any way provoked? One key fact may go some way to elucidate these mysteries. The sixth- former was a girl.

Girls have now been accepted into the sixth forms of high ranking, formerly boys' only, public schools, including Marl- borough, for some 20 years.

'When girls are first allowed into a school you get problems — the boys throw jam in their hair and spit on them and that kind of thing,' said one teacher. 'After three years things generally settle down.'

But distinctions remain. Because girls enter at 16 or 17 it is possible for schools to pick only the cleverest to improve the school's A level results and Oxbridge entrance. It is harder spotting the best at 13, when the boys enter. Because they come to the school late girls are in a permanent minority — usually around 30 per cent — in the sixth forms whose academic standards they raise. Typically the hierarchy of the school stays overwhel- mingly male: very few women teachers are employed.

Authority and status remain a male prerogative. A message about the place of women is clearly spelled out to the boys in the school, just as messages are sent to them by the kind of penalties a school gives for bullying girls. In the case of the Marlborough assault, most of the boys involved covered up for one another. Only one was identified, who had been waving her torn bra around: he was suspended for one week.

'They're male societies,' says Averill Burgess, headmistress of South Hamp- stead High, an all-girl school. 'And they remain male societies. They have few women teachers, very few women heads of departments. The adult women pupils see around them are secretaries, cleaners, matrons — it reinforces the idea that women are there to serve the male.'

At Rugby, for example, which has a mixed sixth form, there are 108 girls out of 330 in the upper school, 700 pupils overall. There are three full-time women teachers and five part-time, and around 70 male teachers. Geoff Helliwell, one of the latter, says: 'Fundamentally it is still a boys' school. The girls who come here know what the situation is. They know they will have to cope in a man's world one day.'

Sending a daughter to learn how to cope with her inferiority at Rugby — (and Rugby has a good reputation amongst pupils and teachers as a place for girls) costs £8,000 a year. Yet there is keen competition to get in. Not only is the teaching very good at such schools, but many parents are seduced by something along the lines of Mr Helliwell's argument — if less bluntly put. Girls, they hope, may learn to fight back, to be more assertive, more questioning, in such an atmosphere: it may be a better preparation for life in the City or at the Bar.

It is true that some all-girls schools do not provide a good preparation for such a life. Certainly at the academically excellent state high school and all female Oxford college I attended the qualities encouraged — obedience, passive learning, a willing- ness to ask for help and submissively admit weakness — turned out to be an actual disadvantage outside female-dominated offices. Nor do women teachers automati- cally have high expectations for their 'Eddie! — There's drift-net in the tuna salad.' female pupils' success. One senior figure at my college explained to a group of us that we should try to beome rich in order to give the place financial help: 'Marry mil- lionaires,' she advised. Nor is bullying confined to 'boys' schools'. I remember one 12-year-old who was persecuted by being constantly followed and watched, even over the tops of the partitioned lavatories, till she broke down and was temporarily withdrawn from school. She had seemed weak and an outsider. The danger is that at 'boys' schools', where girls are kept in a permanent minority, the whole female group may be characterised as weak outsiders, including those who are senior, as the Marlborough incident sug- gests. For the argument that training girls in a boys' world prepares them for a mans' world, so pragmatic at first hearing, be- comes less convincing the more it Is. ex- amined. A less seductive, but perhaps more accurate way of putting it, is that educating a minority of girls in a boys' world has the effect on both sexes of confirming the girls' secondary place, then and in the future.

The results of such education may be the very reverse of the hopes parents have when they send their daughters to what they hope is the more wholesome, relaxed atmosphere of a mixed sixth form. Last year a former girl pupil wrote to the Carthusian, the mazagihe of Charterhouse, which has a mixed sixth. 'People always imagine,' she wrote, 'that life for a girl at Charterhouse with "all those boys" must be heaven, especially if she is nice-looking. Quite the contrary. At least if she is unattractive she will be left in peace — unless of course she is particularly un- appealing, then she will be ridiculed.' Because of this pressure, she said, many girls in a school of 700 boys just made friends with other girls at school. She contrasted the friendships she has since made at university with boys — relaxed, easy going, on equal terms — with those she had had at school. 'Girls at Charter- house are treated with no respect, even by their friends,' she wrote. 'The teaching is inspiring . . . the facilities are excel- lent . . . You can have an absolutely mar- vellous time at Charterhouse but God help you if you're not prepared to do it their way.'

Not all girls in her position think that the price of success in a mixed sixth form is inevitably submission to the unwritten rule that boys are superior, but the writer is certainly not alone. A girl currently at another public school, who, like the letter- writer, preferred to be anonymous, said: 'There's real pressure. They'll shout out scores out of ten for how you look. If you turn someone down in the upper sixth, and you're in the year below, they can't cope. The whole year gangs up on you.'

'It's hard to be just friends with people. You'll be walking with a boy to another class and someone will walk past and say "nice pull" or wink at him. They'll say, their ideal woman is at the sink with a mattress strapped to her back. When the boys bait the girls the teachers don't interrupt. At first I used to give the boys a hard time back, but they were so vindictive I had to learn to ignore it. It's tribal, and if it's ever going to change it will have to start in their prep schools. They've already got it by the time they come here, let alone by the time they reach the sixth.'

The cost of this experience to her pa- rents was well over £8,000 a year. She stuck it out because the teaching was good, and leaving would feel like surrender. Boys too, of course, may also be bullied at school, particularly if they are Jewish, coloured, or in some other way different. The girls' accounts are eerily similar to that given by Sir Ranulph Fiennes of his time at Eton in the Sixties. The fact that he was a pretty boy haunted his whole school life. Twice he was attacked physically, and he was constantly accused of a variety of dubious activities simply because of his prettiness. Not until he got bigger and lost his looks did the unpleasantness stop. It may be that some girls are now experienc- ing directly attitudes to women which could only be rehearsed on pretty boys in all-boy schools.

I spoke to an undergraduate who had been at a southern public 'boys' school' sixth, now at a single sex Oxbridge college. She too did not want to take the consequ- ences of breaking the tribal code by being named. 'At the time I enjoyed it,' she said. 'I didn't want to come here. But now I can see how much I accepted at school. There were only one third girls there, and we took a lot of abuse for being brighter. At least one teacher let it happen openly. They'd pick on your physical features. We all became paranoid about our looks. If you didn't go out with them you'd be accused of being lesbian. I'm wary of single-sex schools, but I don't think being in a minority works either.'

Many schools, none the less, deliberate- ly keep girls in a minority. The Master of Haileybury, David Jewell, (a one-third girls mixed sixth, 11 full-time women teachers and 60 men) explained that at present his school is exempt from equal opportunities legislation. 'But if we took girls at 13 we'd lose the exemption. We'd have to go towards equality, and I don't want to take half the present number of boys or double the size of the school.'

What this amounts to is positive discri- mination in favour of boy pupils. Positive discrimination in favour of women teachers is, however, still regarded by most public schools as unjust.

A few top public schools are now, however, taking girls at every level. Head- masters of other schools suggest it is only because they are failing to attract enough good boys. The schools involved deny it, and it may well be that market demand from parents and an influx of enlightened headmasters is creating a future supply of co-educational schools. It is not a present supply, for they are not taking junior girls in anything like equal numbers. The dan- ger is that they will end up, like many of • the previously all-male Oxbridge colleges, with an unwritten quota of around 30 per cent female entrants, and even fewer female members of staff.

King's School, Canterbury, which is also taking junior girls, has received a ten-year exemption from equal opportunities leg- islation on the mysterious grounds that its buildings are listed. So its girls remain a minority even in the new junior intake, though the school denies that there is a hidden quota for the future. Overall there are 160 girls to 550 boys, and only 12 women out of 70 members of staff.

Marlborough, which has had girls in the sixth since 1968, began to take junior girls last year. Under its five-year plan it will end in 1993 with a two-to-one ratio boys to girls. It is possible that ratios may be reviewed but the wisdom of the experience at pre-school level is that two-to-one makes for a balanced co-educational community. said the school spokesman. Surely, I said, a two-to-one ratio produced an unbalanced community? `Ah,' replied the spokesman, 'Full co-education is a term open to de- bate.' I asked for elucidation. 'Girls tend to be a bit maturer at 11. They tend to stay ahead till 16 or 17.' Though one might have thought that in that case a mix of two-to- one in the opposite direction would be logical, schools of this kind find old cus- toms hard to change. No wonder some unhallowed traditions of Britain's great schools, enacted in front of the great fire at Rugby in Tom Brown's day or on Marl- borough's playing fields in this, will con- tinue to be cherished.